LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Gonzo: One of the nicer people I’ve met over the years around the free speech radio community is Noelle Hanrahan. When many thousands of us loyal free speech radio listeners swarmed to defend free speech radio KPFA from the armed thugs, backed by Janet Reno‘s office under the auspices of then-president Bill Clinton‘s administration, which arrested broadcasters, including Dennis Bernstein (Flashpoints, Executive Producer), for speaking out against labour violations and corruption of free speech radio leadership, Noelle Hanrahan courageously climbed up a ladder, scaling the front of KPFA’s building on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Berkeley, CA, in defiance of cops surrounding the radio station, to unfurl a free speech radio KPFA solidarity banner. Such is the deep commitment of most of the people working in, and around, free speech radio, whose broadcast signals extend throughout the USA, and worldwide online.

Amplifying the voices of the silenced and marginalised is a noble endeavour. And, perhaps, no sector of our society is more silenced and marginalised than our imprisoned population, which seems to constitute a nation, within a nation, of subjugated people with truncated human rights. In defiance of all of that, imprisoned journalist and political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, has become one of the strongest voices reporting on the American Nightmare from behind bars, from death row. For many years now, Noelle Hanrahan has been recording Mumia‘s essays, reports, and commentaries by telephone and publishing them at PrisonRadio.org, where free speech radio stations around the world can access and broadcast them.

A few days ago, Mumia Abu Jamal filed a new audio commentary for Prison Radio entitled “The Trump Party“. Even behind bars, even on death row, even suffering through being denied life-saving medical care for hepatitis C by prison officials, Mumia‘s journalism is far more perceptive, intrepid, and useful than most of our nation’s broadcast media. Listen (or download) here.

Messina

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[Transcript by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Prison Radio]

PRISON RADIO—[20 MAR 2016] “‘The Trump Party‘. It’s months from the conventions. But, if today is any indication, the results are all but guaranteed. No matter the results of the election, the impact on the Republican Party is clear. After years of playing with its southern strategy, the party has been colonised by a northern real estate magnate, Donald J. Trump—loud, bombastic, boastful, narrow-minded, bigoted, and vain. Trump now epitomises the party.

“The party faithful had worshipped at the steps of the Chamber of Commerce and genuflected before the big bell on Wall Street. It’s only natural that they would bow in the presence of a billionaire—Donald Trump.

“It has become, in essence, the party of business. And, in furtherance thereof, it has turned a blind eye to the pains and needs of the poor and the dispossessed.

“It was not always so.

“It was the 1870s, when the spirit of Lincoln animated the party. Its most loyal voter was the newly emancipated black people. Wives tossed their husbands out of their homes, if they dared vote Democratic.

“But the Republicans, in their not-so-Great Compromise in the 1870s, supported Rutherford B. Hayes for president, who announced a let it alone policy, allowing racist southern forces to attack at will black voters.

“Black troops were removed from the south and, incidentally, marched to the west to fight Indians. And black Republicans were left to the tender mercies of the terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan. That betrayal burned in black Americans for decades.

“In the ’60s, the time of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Liberation movement, the Republicans, once again turned their backs on blacks and waged a Southern Strategy, an appeal to white nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-blackness.

“Donald J. Trump is the logical development of that process—loud, bombastic, bullying, racist. He is the very embodiment of the so-called conservative movement. He is more.

“He has become the Republican Party. And Lincoln has left the building.

“He is the true leader of the newest version of the Grand Old Party, the Trump Party.

PRISON RADIO—[13 MAR 2016] “‘Unleashing the Beast‘ In a recent commentary on the pending election, I said that one needn’t worry about billionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump, who wouldn’t last. I was wrong.

“I seriously underestimated Trump’s ability to pummel and assail his opponents. I should have known better, for money is the mother’s milk of politics. And, while Trump hasn’t been forced to spend his resources, his opponents have been bleeding green.

“Trump’s bombast has attracted the brutish spirits of their nature to rise from their growling slumber. Now, presidential rallies are fistfights and curses, especially when Trump protesters are black folks.

“The ugly image of white-haired retirees pushing and punching young people the age of their grandchildren reveals the roiling racist hatreds, that lurk beneath, awaiting activation. Trump, with an easy cruelty, gives permission for these assaults by his minions.

“Richard Hofstadter, the brilliant author of the classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics, examined the American right-wing and, particularly, described what he called pseudo-conservatives in their ranks. Hofstadter writes that ‘thosenew dissenters‘—he’s writing in the 1950s—’are a threat to true conservatism’—explaining—’the new dissent is certainly not radical. There are hardly any radicals of any sort left. Nor is it precisely conservatism. Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but it is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservativism, in the classical sense of the word. And they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment, as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration. Their political reactions express, rather, a profound, if largely unconscious, hatred of our society and its ways, a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive evidence, both, from clinical techniques and from their own modes of expression.’

“Richard Hofstadter’s insights from a half century ago show the moment we now inhabit—raw, naked hatreds, exploited for political purposes to fuel social discontent, to buttress political ambitions of the neo-fascists, forces unleashed to sow the seeds of disaster.